Helmut Wagner (stage designer)

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Helmut Wagner (* 28). March 1936 in Schneidemühl, West Prussia, today Piła, Poland; † July 23, 2009 in Dresden was a German stage designer, painter and university teacher. In teaching, he attached importance to the combination of artistic creativity and solid craftsmanship training. The variety of design and technical possibilities of the stage designer he linked to the time-bound stage realization of the concrete contents of the piece.

Live life
Helmut Wagner was born in 1936 as the youngest of four children of a qualified farmer. His mother was initially a housewife and later worked as a language teacher for Russian after the escape. Wagner attended from 1942 the elementary school in Insterburg, East Prussia (today Chernyachovsk, Russian Kaliningrad oblast). The family fled to Thuringia in 1944. Wagner graduated from Lessing High School in Erfurt in 1954 and began his professional career in 1955 as a stage worker at the Schauspielhaus Erfurt. From 1956 to 1958 he studied theatre painting at the Fachschule für Angewandte Kunst in Leipzig and from 1958 to 1963 stage and costume design with Hans Reichard at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HfBK) Dresden. Thereafter he worked until 1967 at the Landesbühnen Sachsen and at the Deutsche Nationaltheater Weimar, where he participated in the Faust productions of Fritz Bennewitz 1965-1967.

Subsequently, in addition to his GDR-wide productions (in addition to Erfurt, Dresden and Weimar, among others, in East Berlin, Chemnitz, Schwerin, Halle, Bautzen, Zwickau), he took on a teaching position as senior assistant at the HfBK Dresden, where he was appointed lecturer and head of the stage and costume design department in 1973 and professor in this subject in 1984. He directed by invitation at the National Theatre Nicosia (Cyprus, 1978) and the City Theatre Lappeenranta (Finland, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1987). He also participated in the first Prague Quadriennale for Theatre Architecture and Scenographic Creature in 1967 and also exhibited there in 1975. In 1988 he designed the stage design for the performance of Heinrich von Kleist’s The Broken Pitcher at the Staatliche Deutsche Schauspieltheater in Temirtau in the Soviet Union (now Kazakhstan). After his retirement, many travel and landscape sketches enriched his artistic work. This creative period experienced its peak in the years 2001 to 2009. From 2001 Wagner was also a member of the artist group L’Villa.

Helmut Wagner was married and father of two children. His son-in-law is the historian Armin Wagner.

Exhibitions Stage Design (selection)
1975: 3rd Prague Quadrennale
1982/1982 and 1987/1988: 9. and 10. Art Exhibition of the GDR
1978: Nicosia
1982: Oslo
1984: Sofia

Literature
Ingo Sandner (ed.): Forty years of the Dresden School of Fine Arts 1947–1987. University of Fine Arts, Dresden 1987, without ISBN.
Ortsverein Loschwitz-Wachwitz et al. (ed.): Artist on the Elbhang. First band. Elbhang-Kurier-Verlag, Dresden 1999, ISBN 978-3-936